Often times, when Mary and I travel to our place in Florida from our place in Connecticut, we forego air travel and opt to drive instead.

The trip is 1445 miles. It will take us about 21 hours. The plane flight would be a little more than three hours.

Of course, air travel provides a huge time advantage over automobile travel. However, so much is lost when you fly over the land than when you drive through it. The experience of driving is more tactile, and you are immersed in the landscape when you have the road under you instead of clouds.

When we drive, we don’t have to worry about our luggage or security checkpoints. Nobody makes us take off our shoes or opens our laptops. We get to eat meals other than peanuts, and we only pay about $2.00 for each bottle of beer. We can stop at any point to get out stretch. We meet interesting folks along the way. The bathrooms aren’t cramped. And the sights are absolutely amazing.

On the first day of the trip, we traveled 700 miles, ending up in Fancy Gap, VA for the night.

We stayed in a local motel that’s name was “Motel.” $37.50 a night, double occupancy. It was nothing fancy, but it was clean, didn’t smell, had two double beds and a bathroom with a shower.

We went to dinner at a chain restaurant named “Shoney’s.” We had the buffet for $9.50 apiece. The buffet was good – fried chicken, ham, pork, pasta salads, fresh soups, mashed potatoes, green salads…etc. What impressed me about it the most was that the food was all fresh. It wasn’t cardboard crap that spent hours under heat lamps. For a grand total of $25.14, (tip included) we walked out of the place stuffed.

Our waitress was a pleasant woman in her mid-forties with blonde and brown hair, a soft middle, and a smile that split her face in half. She was making a career out of being a Shoney’s waitress for $7.25 an hour. As we left the restaurant, she looked up from her serving station, waved and said, “Baa!”

I looked at Mary Ellen and said, “Baa?”

Mary smiled and translated for me. “Good-bye.”

Most people heading from Coventry, CT to Palmetto, FL would spend the bulk of their time tooling down Interstate 95, which is a huge and crowded super highway. Pretty much a vanilla-flavored, white-bread trip with little character and texture.

We choose a different route when we travel. Route 384 to 84 to 81 to 77 to 26. All of these are Interstates that have only two lanes going in each direction. We don’t pick up Interstate 95 until Charlotte, SC. This route is about 100 miles longer than the super highway, but well worth it, if you’ve got the time.

CT to NY (avoiding the Big Apple) to PA to VA. We watched the sun set in The Blue Ridge Mountains on our first night out. Amazing and beautiful. Awe-inspiring.

The next morning, we were on the road at 7:30, and witnessed sunrise over the Shenandoah Valley. Blues and oranges and lavenders. Breath-taking. Black silhouettes of ragged mountains ringing a soft and rolling expanse of rivers and pastures, paved roads and buildings. I found myself wishing that I could have seen it the way the pioneers saw it a couple of centuries ago. What would it have been like to see a vast expanse of wilderness, untouched by humans, in all of it’s feral magnificience?

In a plane, a friendly pilot might come over the P.A. system and say something like, “That is The Shenandoah Valley out of the left side of the airplane.” People would glance out for a few a seconds, and then return to the in-flight movie.

Driving through it, Mary and I got to experience it for over an hour.

There was a TV show back in the sixties called “Then Came Bronson”. The main character was a young man who sported a blue knit hat and a black, leather jacket. He rode his motorcycle down the interstates, stopping at a new town every week where he would meet folks, fall in love with a pretty girl, get into a fight with a local thug or two, and then hop on his bike and head off for a new town the next week.

The theme song for the show was as follows:

Going down that long and lonesome highway

Bound for the mountains and the plains.

Sure ain’t nothing here that’s gonna tie me,

And I’ve got some friends I’d like to see again.

One of these days I’m gonna settle down,

But till I do, I won’t be hanging ‘round.

Going down that long and lonesome highway.

Gonna live life my way.



I always wondered what the lure of “the highway” was all about. Now I know.

As we drove past houses, farms and fields, I began feeling like Charles Kuralt – discovering the real America.


The clerks in the convenience stores, the waitresses, the fellow diners, the folks who go home at the end of the shift and deal with their kids, their spouses, their lives – they all flavored our trip and gave us a broader feel for life in these United States.

John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley also passed through my mind as we tooled around from state to state.

The book is a journal of his trip across America in the early sixties. Steinbeck bought a pick-up truck and put a turtle camper on the back of it. When he stocked it with food and water, he took his dog, Charley, with him, and he headed off to see America. It is a GREAT book, and a wonderful series of snapshots of a country that was undergoing severe growing pains during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

One of the most interesting people that Mary and I met on our journey was a clerk in a BP Gas Station somewhere in southern SC. As I entered the convenience store at 8 a.m., she beamed a blinding smile at me that flashed dazzling white teeth and contrasted starkly with her chocolate-brown face. In the most cheerful of voices, she called out from behind the cash register, “Good morning, y’all! I just brewed a fresh pot of coffee just for you!!!!”

We struck up a lively conversation about our children and grandchildren, and I smiled while watching her get more and more animated about her family.

Then, as I was leaving the place with a 20-oz. coffee in hand, I told her that she was a true joy to encounter first thing in the morning. She countered with a huge laugh and said, “You’re lucky, honey! I’m not always this cute!”

I never met a flight attendant that was so personable.

Eight hours after that, Mary and I were home in Palmetto, FL.